Multimodal One-Shot Learning of Speech and Images

Imagine a robot is shown new concepts visually together with spoken tags, e.g. "milk", "eggs", "butter". After seeing one paired audio-visual example per class, it is shown a new set of unseen instances of these objects, and asked to pick the "milk". Without receiving any hard labels, could it learn to match the new continuous speech input to the correct visual instance? Although unimodal one-shot learning has been studied, where one labelled example in a single modality is given per class, this example motivates multimodal one-shot learning. Our main contribution is to formally define this task, and to propose several baseline and advanced models. We use a dataset of paired spoken and visual digits to specifically investigate recent advances in Siamese convolutional neural networks. Our best Siamese model achieves twice the accuracy of a nearest neighbour model using pixel-distance over images and dynamic time warping over speech in 11-way cross-modal matching.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables; accepted to ICASSP 201

Egyptian Revolution: The Music of Reform

Overview: On January 31, 2013 National Public Radio (NPR) reporter Leila Fadel broadcasted an interview with Omar Kamal, devout Salafi turned beat boxer in Cairo, Egypt. Kamal was a drug addict and a drummer who decided he wanted more out of his life and searched for fulfillment in Salafi Islam. The Salafist sect is a very traditional, strict and conservative form of Islam which, among other things, discourages its followers from playing music – especially the kind of angst-filled rock that Kamal was playing. In an attempt to find direction, Kamal gave up his music and followed the religion to the letter, obeying the rules the leaders set in place for him and dedicating himself to this new lifestyle. The new life required him to accept new values and limits on his behavior and character; more specifically it required a musician to stop playing music and give up a passion. Shortly after, protests broke out in Egypt calling for the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. His regime had never supported the Salafist religion, and under his rule Salafi Muslims endured persecution and turmoil. Despite the previous maltreatment, the Salafist leaders advised their followers not to participate in the protest demonstrations and to avoid the conflict. Omar Kamal was surprised to see the leaders take such a hypocritical stance after all the harassment they had borne in the past years. He decided to leave his religious path to join the revolution and fight against Mubarak. Once he joined the protests, he went back to his music finding that not only could he express his anger against the government, but he could also express his confusions and frustrations about his religious experience and his identity crisis. His return to a musician’s lifestyle served as an outlet that gave Kamal that sense of fulfillment that he searched for in religion. While still a devout Muslim, Kamal claims that the Salafis must adapt to the new Egyptian culture and support the changes it is undergoing if the religion wants support and followers. He states in the NPR interview, “the people aren’t stupid and they won’t believe you, just because you claim that God is on your side.” This clash between modernization and traditionalism is part of the reason why music is thriving so well in revolutionary Egypt. Musicians and fans draw from a plethora of musical genres and with this spectrum of musical styles, there is a song that speaks to everyone

Keynote address

Approved and projected probe mission strategies for the outer planet exploration programs are briefly outlined

Conceptual Engineering, Topics, Metasemantics, and Lack of Control

Conceptual engineering is now a central topic in contemporary philosophy. Just 4-5 years ago it wasn’t. People were then engaged in the engineering of various philosophical concepts (in various sub-disciplines), but typically not self-consciously so. Qua philosophical method, conceptual engineering was under-explored, often ignored, and poorly understood. In my lifetime, I have never seen interest in a philosophical topic grow with such explosive intensity. The sociology behind this is fascinating and no doubt immensely complex (and an excellent case study for those interested in the dynamics of academic disciplines). That topic, however, will have to wait for another occasion. Suffice it to say that if Fixing Language (FL) contributed even a little bit to this change of focus in philosophical methodology, it would have achieved one of its central goals. In that connection, it is encouraging that the papers in this symposium are in fundamental agreement about the significance and centrality of conceptual engineering to philosophy. That said, the goal of FL was not only to advocate for a topic, but also to defend a particular approach to it: The Austerity Framework. These replies have helped me see clearer the limitations of that view and points where my presentation was suboptimal. The responses below are in part a reconstruction of what I had in mind while writing the book and in part an effort to ameliorate. I’m grateful to the symposiasts for helping me get a better grip on these very hard issue

Sixteen space-filling curves and traversals for d-dimensional cubes and simplices

This article describes sixteen different ways to traverse d-dimensional space recursively in a way that is well-defined for any number of dimensions. Each of these traversals has distinct properties that may be beneficial for certain applications. Some of the traversals are novel, some have been known in principle but had not been described adequately for any number of dimensions, some of the traversals have been known. This article is the first to present them all in a consistent notation system. Furthermore, with this article, tools are provided to enumerate points in a regular grid in the order in which they are visited by each traversal. In particular, we cover: five discontinuous traversals based on subdividing cubes into 2^d subcubes: Z-traversal (Morton indexing), U-traversal, Gray-code traversal, Double-Gray-code traversal, and Inside-out traversal; two discontinuous traversals based on subdividing simplices into 2^d subsimplices: the Hill-Z traversal and the Maehara-reflected traversal; five continuous traversals based on subdividing cubes into 2^d subcubes: the Base-camp Hilbert curve, the Harmonious Hilbert curve, the Alfa Hilbert curve, the Beta Hilbert curve, and the Butz-Hilbert curve; four continuous traversals based on subdividing cubes into 3^d subcubes: the Peano curve, the Coil curve, the Half-coil curve, and the Meurthe curve. All of these traversals are self-similar in the sense that the traversal in each of the subcubes or subsimplices of a cube or simplex, on any level of recursive subdivision, can be obtained by scaling, translating, rotating, reflecting and/or reversing the traversal of the complete unit cube or simplex.Comment: 28 pages, 12 figures. v2: fixed a confusing typo on page 12, line